Power in the workplace
is a topic that interests me greatly. You can’t advance one iota in the
workplace without becoming keenly aware of power differentials and how power is
used as both a force for good and harm. I’m of the opinion that
desiring power is not in and of itself bad. I've always sought power in my
jobs. Why? Because with power you can actually make an impact and get stuff
done. Without it, you can’t.

And it does no good to pound your fists against your chest while crying out against the unfairness of it all, as I've seen some younger workers do (metaphorically speaking, that is) because somebody had more power than they and had the authority to expect certain things. (I once had an employee tell me she didn't understand why she had to be the one to proactively keep her manager in the loop, when if her manager wanted to know something the manager could just ask. Yes dear. But your manager has the power, and she requested that you proactively keep her informed, okay?)

That said, power must be
used responsibly. Sadly, however, many of us don’t have the maturity or the character to do
that, I’m afraid. The saying “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts
absolutely” is a wise saying, indeed. I know what I’m talking about. When I was
in the fourth grade, I was removed from my post as Line Monitor (and stripped
of my shiny badge, too) for bossing around the first graders (“Get back in line,
you!”). I’d gotten a taste of the Capital P, and it was some heady stuff, man.

Workplace bullying is all about power. Despite what some experts
will claim, I maintain that some targets have what Lipkin calls “referent
power,” defined as “the ability to convey a sense of personal acceptance or
approval. [Referent power] is held by people with charisma, integrity, and
other positive qualities,” which I believe
their bullies envy. I always urge targets of bullying to remember this, because
their bullies are pulling out all the stops to make the targets feel like crap,
as though they’re deficient somehow, when the opposite is usually closer to the truth.

In Why
Power Corrupts and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, Dr. Robert Aziz
writes a very, well … powerful article about power and its debasing characteristics. In the piece, Dr. Aziz also makes an excellent point that I
know for a fact to be true about the manager bullies I’ve encountered—they’re
just not very competent. Not as managers, anyway. And that incompetence leads
to bad management that often includes abuse of power, absent actual malice.

(Not
that this is a complete comfort to the poor souls toiling under these managers,
but it helps a little to understand. As they say, knowledge is power, right?)